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Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

I use DDG for most things, and being totally honest, it's not quite as good as Google, but it's pretty acceptable. Occasionally I'll try the same search on Google, and sometimes it's better. Not always.

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> it's not quite as good as Google

Two years ago, I would have agreed. But Google has gotten dramatically more spammy and full of ads recently. DDG has better results for me 70% of the time.

How do you do that? I'm a huge DDG fan and am 99% degoogled, force myself to use DDG every couple of weeks but always end up back at Google, because from my experience it's just miles better. Don't want to hate on DDG though, since there is obviously a massive gap in resources between both projects.

Great thing about using DDG is you can have both.

In my experience DDG is fine for general information but Google is better for very specific information.

But DDG supports !Bang. So you can do "!g" in your search bar for you specific query and it uses Google. Or "!w" to go directly to wikipedia or "!a" to search Amazon.

There's over 10,000 of them https://duckduckgo.com/bang so it's great for whatever sites you frequently look for information on.

And can even do things like complex math equations with "!wa" (Wolfram Alpha).

Point being, using DuckDuckGo as your default search engine doesn't mean you are limited to its' results. Personally I get the best of a lot of worlds by using it.

Wow I had no idea about this! Actually going to make me switch back to DDG

They really should market this more, its one of the best features.

or use !sp and use google through a proxy

Yeah the problem about the bangs is that whenever I force myself to use DDG again I will end up using the !sp bang exclusively after around a week and decide to switch back to Google a while after that, because typing !sp after every search defeats the initial idea why I inteded to use DDG in the first place. Until I hate myself for using Google again and switch back. It's an endless cycle I cannot escape :/

so you at least try with no bang first and find ddg search results unsatisfactory? if you default to !sp maybe it would be better to use use startpage as a search engine, is it worse in some way than duckduckgo (excluding obvious diff of bangs)

Yes for some reason I have never considered using startpage as my default search engine and instead went straight back to google. Thanks for the tip. I'll give it a try next time I'm at this stage of the cycle again .... :)

I used to use the !s bang to get Google results via Startpage, but I find myself doing it less and less.

Personally, I had great results with Searx - a metasearch engine that aggregates results from different engines. It supports DDG bangs (!g uses Google search, !!g redirects to Google search) and language flags (:en uses English, :ru uses Russian, etc)

>and full of ads recently

Are there really people here that don't use uBlock Origin or a different adblocker? I can't remember the last time I have seen an ad on a screen.

Whenever I'm on a new machine I get a momentary glimpse of what an ungodly mess the Web is without adblockers. I'd love to know what percentage of web users employ an adblocker, I suppose as that number increases the remaining users can expect to see an increase in both the volume and visibility (and arguably obnoxiousness) of the ads.

I don’t. I don’t pirate software either^. They are not the same thing, but in both instances sometimes you will negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line. So I don’t do either.

Edit: to clarify. I don’t think any less of any one for doing whatever or me being better than any one.

^there are exceptions. I’m sure if I needed to use Photoshop for a day I’d do something akin to pirating. In this case I don’t think it’s a big deal with Adobe being worth $300B.

> negatively impact the little guy’s bottom line

We are talking about Google here. How is blocking ads from Google "impacting the little guys's bottom line"?

The posts were about blocking ads en mass. Not about blocking Google specifically. It would be incredibly rare for some one to get ublock or something similar and only block multi billion dollar companies.

It's the smaller ad networks and obscure sites that are more likely to have malware sneak into the ads, though, so it's safer to block everything.

Sure. I could have similar or different but nonetheless reasons for software and apps. Maybe somehow getting around a SaaS app. Or for other circumstances like finding random people on the web to split a substack or Stratchery subscription with (the latter happened on Twitter and people were not pleased).

The reason doesn’t change my point. The smaller person is hurt by any of these actions when done to their thing - ad blocking, piracy, workarounds, etc.

This doesn't stop SEO promotion. However I can't say DDG hasn't occasionally ranked some submarine results higher.

I don't use adblockers because I need to see the web as the 'users' see it. When I do use a blocker I always forget to turn it off to do troubleshooting. Eventually I left it off... I'll proxy or incognito or whatever when it need to.

I don't know the exact timeframe it changed, but I've really noticed the difference around the last few months or so. It feels like it's a lot more common for me to do a search in Google that I would expect to have good results and be genuinely surprised at how every page is total garbage.

I rarely, very rarely, need to use !g in DDG searches these days. I don’t even really think about Google any more if I can’t find something, I usually just try a bit harder with DDG. I’m a happy customer

I use it for everything, and I have no idea if it's as good as Google or not because I've never needed to find out - that's good enough for me.

If the results on DDG are not satisfactory, I prepend a !g and try again.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You can also append!

Or put it somewhere in the middle of your query! :)

You might want to prefer !sp to !g if you want Google results without compromising privacy. Startpage is just a privacy proxy for Google results.

Startpage was purchased by an advertising organization that apparently "specializes in targeted advertising":

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

Startpage started aggressively monetizing a few months ago. At least that's when I realized there are way more paid results (ads) than before. I've been mooching for years so I thought that's ok. Maybe the owner wants some return for their money and I can live with scrolling a few more paid results.

But they didn't stop there. I bailed as soon as they started requiring js no matter what. They actively deny access to the site without js enabled.

Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.

And occasionally, Google is worse!

Particularly when searching for information that our governments have been paid by corporations to keep us from finding. Google is massively censored.

Such a claim warrants some examples.

How do you present examples when all it takes is a narrative of "conspiracy theory" to dismiss them? We know both government and corporations are, remain, and will continue to remain corruptible. We know they've done bad things, we know they do bad things, we know they can continue to do bad things.

So to be clear you have no examples, or proof of any kind for this claim?

don't you see, the lack of examples is proof I am correct!!!

It's that there's a conspiracy, but if they provide an example, you will accuse them of believing there's a conspiracy, which would distract from the argument that there is a conspiracy.

Or citation, or any credible resource, really.

This reeks like Conspiracy Theory all through. And if it is legit, that is a pity, because most, or many people will dismiss it for "quacking like a Wacky Conspiracy Theory".

The assertion "<x> is a wing nut conspiracy theorist" is itself a conversation-ender. Or at best, the opening to a never-ending version of Culture Wars, V304,045.

Over the weekend we had a very civilized discussion about tribal stupidity (prompted by the Dietrich Bonhoeffer essay), and the reason it didn't descend into CW is that no one provided any examples. The instant anyone gave an example, the particulars of that example would have taken over.

So I can appreciate the desire for citations, but you have to realize that if he'd provided any, everyone would have just argued about those.

> and the reason it didn't descend into CW is that no one provided any examples. The instant anyone gave an example, the particulars of that example would have taken over.

On the other hand it's easy to think you're pontificating wisely but you've become untethered from reality. Absolutely it's easy for broad discussions to get distracted by lawyering examples, but the GGP made a specific claim, so they invited the request for evidence.

DDG has never worked for me, and I've tried. While I've been a happy Brave Search user since day 1. I'm not joking when I say it's the best search experience after Google, by a mile.

I'm with you at this point.

I used to be a ddg user exclusively. The only time I use google is when searching a location nearby. Ddg has gotten worse over the last year or two, unusable almost for anything that isn't current events. It is full of blog spam whenever I search anything.

I've been using gigablast here and there, it's good for obscure, completely organic search results, but that means it's results feel like search before google existed. Brave fills the gap for me, it feels like how google used to feel before all the cruft started getting added in.

Was very pleasantly surprise with brave search.

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